I'll definitely keep an eye on it for the next few days. I'm fairly confident that was the issue, as the results were an almost instant improvement in the functionality of the network card.
I agree with what you're saying about making it fail when the IRQ is under 16 - the thought that crossed my mind is that if it were the XEN SCSI (VBD) driver that decided to work intermittently, there could be some more serious issues in terms of the integrity of the data written to disk. Better to get a BSOD on boot up because the PCI driver cannot get the correct IRQ than run the system for a while and have a BSOD and FS corruption because of an IRQ conflict.
-Nick
>>> "James Harper" <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 2008/11/11 19:39 >>>
> Okay, well, stumbled upon the following site:
>
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12269>
> The site gives instructions for setting up a boot entry that specifies
the
> new HAL DLL that you want to use (extracting the new DLL and then
using
> the /hal= switch to tell Windows to use that HAL). After you boot
with
> that /hal option, Windows permanently installs the new HAL and then
asks
> you to reboot. After the reboot, the new HAL is installed and the XEN
> drivers are getting the proper IRQs and functioning correctly.
>
> Thanks for the help James & Dustin - just took a little pointing to
get me
> going in the right direction.
>
Please get back to me in a few days just to confirm that things are
still running well (eg that the IRQ thing definitely changed things for
the better).
Making Windows do the right thing with IRQ's etc was really hard, I
tried quite a few different approaches and this was the best one I could
come up with. It is a pity that it doesn't work with apic=0, but I don't
think that there is a valid reason these days why you would set apic=0.
Previously (xen 3.0.x) it was required to make some versions of windows
work.
I may keep the code in there that causes a fail when the no IRQ's >= 16
are available. It sounds like IRQ's < 16 don't work properly and given
the choice between 'appearing to work but crashing in strange ways' and
'not working at all', I'd prefer the latter. It's easier to get to the
bottom of :)
James
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